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The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an ...

Women beware midwives

Tom Shippey, 10 May 1990

The Medieval Woman 
by Edith Ennan, translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Blackwell, 327 pp., £32.50, November 1989, 9780631161660
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Not of woman born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 
by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski.
Cornell, 204 pp., $27.95, March 1990, 0 8014 2292 2
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Childhood in the Middle Ages 
by Shulamith Shahar.
Routledge, 342 pp., £35, May 1990, 0 415 02624 5
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Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries 
by Mary Wack.
Pennsylvania, 354 pp., $39.95, February 1990, 9780812281422
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Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality 
by Alexandre Leupin, translated by Kate Cooper.
Harvard, 261 pp., £27.95, July 1990, 0 674 06170 5
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... expected to live through a Kaiserschnitt. How could she? You have to open not only the abdominal wall but also the uterus, with no anaesthetics, no antisepsis and no practice. It caused a good deal of comment in the Middle Ages that although Caesar was called a caeso matris utero, ‘from the cut womb of his mother’, Suetonius remarked that Caesar’s ...

Fancy Dress

Peter Campbell: Millais, Burne-Jones and Leighton, 15 April 1999

Millais: Portraits 
by Peter Funnell and Malcolm Warner.
National Portrait Gallery, 224 pp., £35, February 1999, 1 85514 255 4
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John Everett Millais 
by G.H. Fleming.
Constable, 318 pp., £20, August 1998, 0 09 478560 0
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Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer 
by Stephen Wildman and John Christian.
Abrams, 360 pp., £48, October 1998, 0 8109 6522 4
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Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity 
edited by Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Yale, 332 pp., £40, March 1999, 0 300 07937 0
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... important and when a college or livery company does feel the need to keep the line of faces on the wall up to date, additions look sheepish, like members of a wedding party not used to their morning-coats. Funnel points out that contemporary press accounts of Millais stress his manliness. He dressed (and hunted and fished) like a gentleman. He was a ...

Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
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Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
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About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
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The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
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... canvases visible, he used to keep one of his earliest abstractions, Number 22, 1949, against a wall in a narrow storage area. This early essay into a kind of limitless space, with huge areas of floating yellow and orange, interrupted only by a red band straddling the canvas from side to side, shocked unaccustomed eyes. Rothko had not quite reached the ...

The Rack, the Rapier, the Ruff and the Fainting Nun

Nicholas Penny: Manet/Velázquez, 10 July 2003

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting 
by Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre et al.
Yale, 592 pp., £50, March 2003, 0 300 09880 4
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... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...

Deaths at Two O’Clock

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Suicide in the USSR, 17 February 2011

Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921-29 
by Kenneth Pinnow.
Cornell, 276 pp., £32.95, March 2011, 978 0 8014 4766 2
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... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...

On your way, phantom

Colin Burrow: ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, 7 June 2012

Bring Up the Bodies 
by Hilary Mantel.
Fourth Estate, 411 pp., £20, May 2012, 978 0 00 731509 3
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... true. ‘Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.’ The recurrence of Henry’s song goes along with some artful thoughts about the relationship between manuscript poetry and the relatively new medium of print. Ballads about the king and Anne are printed, and the king insists that their author should be ...

Somebody Shoot at Me!

Ian Sansom: Woody Guthrie’s Novel, 9 May 2013

House of Earth: A Novel 
by Woody Guthrie.
Fourth Estate, 234 pp., £14.99, February 2013, 978 0 00 750985 0
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... the infamous, often unsung verse suggesting that all property is theft: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was made for you and me. And so an angry song of protest and a hymn to trespass became part of a celebration of the American ...

More than a Million Names

Mattathias Schwartz: American Intelligence, 16 June 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 
by Michael Hayden.
Penguin, 464 pp., £21.99, February 2016, 978 1 59420 656 6
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... suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ‘essential liberty’ for ‘a little temporary safety’. According ...

Act like Men, Britons!

Tom Shippey: Celticity, 31 July 2008

The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, edited by Michael Reeve, translated by Neil Wright.
Boydell, 307 pp., £50, November 2007, 978 1 84383 206 5
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The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Broadview, 383 pp., £8.99, January 2008, 978 1 55111 639 6
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... curtly dismissed by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that Wright, having edited ...

Diary

Paul Theroux: Out to Lunch, 13 April 2023

... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral decay of Western civilisation (channelling Pat ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... the bend in the river, a shape that gives purpose to an inadequately defined horizon. On the wall of the pub is a map of the area from the pre-Dome period: a Guide to the Thames (by Catamaran Cruises). This improved landscape cuts directly from the Royal Naval College to the Thames Barrier, so that the peninsula is not merely occulted, it doesn’t ...

Jailed, Failed, Forgotten

Dani Garavelli: Deaths in Custody, 20 February 2025

... units are warm places,’ a social worker told me:They have carpets and drawings on the wall. The staff wear their own clothes and are not afraid to give new arrivals a hug. Polmont is grey and clinical. He would have been met and searched by uniformed officers … But it would have been walking into the wing that scared him most: the rows of ...

The American Virus

Eliot Weinberger, 4 June 2020

... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...

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